Windows 7: Is the System Image of windows 7 compatible with Hard drive upgrade

Danny12122 · 23 Oct 2013

Hi All,

This is where I am I have an Dell Inspiron 15 n5050 which came with 500GB Seagate Momentous 5400RPM hard drive....
now its gone and wont spin at all so I am replacing it with 750GB Seagate Momentous 5400RPM Hard Drive will the System Image still work on that....

or I have to Start fresh

richnrockville · 23 Oct 2013

Danny121222, welcome to the windows 7 forum.

Windows 7 image backup will restore to a larger hard disk, just not a smaller one. Making sure that you create the boot disk that
the image program has you create.

I have done it lots of times. When you restore the image to your larger disk, you might have extra space at the end which you will have to extend your C drive size to include that unused space..

Rich

Legbiter · 05 Dec 2013

Personally I ALWAYS shrink the C Drive to around 50Gb and create another partition(s) for programs, media and data.
Look at it like this: would you put your groceries, your kids and the dog under the hood of your car next to the engine?

The extra degree of separation means that an OS crash doesn't risk anything but the OS, and back up Images are much smaller.

whs · 05 Dec 2013

Quote: Originally Posted by Legbiter

Personally I ALWAYS shrink the C Drive to around 50Gb and create another partition(s) for programs, media and data.
Look at it like this: would you put your groceries, your kids and the dog under the hood of your car next to the engine?

The extra degree of separation means that an OS crash doesn't risk anything but the OS, and back up Images are much smaller.

You can do this with the attached VHD but before you shrink you have to move all user data to an external disk - from the attached VHD. And then Disk Management probably won't shrink sufficiently (because of the MFT) and you have to use e.g. Partition Wizard.

Legbiter · 05 Dec 2013

Quote: Originally Posted by whs

Quote: Originally Posted by Legbiter

Personally I ALWAYS shrink the C Drive to around 50Gb and create another partition(s) for programs, media and data.
Look at it like this: would you put your groceries, your kids and the dog under the hood of your car next to the engine?

The extra degree of separation means that an OS crash doesn't risk anything but the OS, and back up Images are much smaller.

You can do this with the attached VHD but before you shrink you have to move all user data to an external disk - from the attached VHD. And then Disk Management probably won't shrink sufficiently (because of the MFT) and you have to use e.g. Partition Wizard.

Within the context of this post, ie restoring an Image of an entire HDD to a new larger HDD, one can conclude that ALL data has in fact been saved off Disk.